Recognition and corporate wellness: stop rewarding the rescue
Recognition can encourage reliable work or celebrate the avoidable emergencies that exhaust the people an organisation most wants to retain.
The performance question
The employee who prevents a crisis may receive less attention than the employee who resolves one at midnight. This is an understandable weakness of human observation: a dramatic rescue is visible, while a well designed process looks unremarkable. But recognition is also an instruction. When exceptional availability is repeatedly celebrated, employees can reasonably infer that dependable boundaries are less valuable than heroic recovery. Corporate wellness needs to examine the behaviour management applauds, not just the advice it publishes about rest.
What the evidence supports
HSE guidance on demands addresses achievable work, and its relationships standard concerns positive working and fair treatment. NICE recommends attending to workplace culture in mental wellbeing strategy. These support examining organisational expectations and how employees experience them. They do not prove that an award causes burnout or that recognising exceptional effort is inherently harmful. The concern is a repeated pattern in which avoidable overload is treated as the route to status while prevention and ordinary reliability remain unnoticed.123
A practical approach
Review recent examples of public recognition. Ask what behaviour was praised and whether colleagues could reasonably repeat it without sacrificing recovery or personal commitments. Continue to acknowledge genuine effort, but distinguish appreciation from endorsement of an operating model. Recognise clear handovers, early escalation, sensible prioritisation and problems prevented. When a rescue is necessary, follow the thanks with a review of why it was necessary. Avoid making the individual who helped responsible for permanently compensating for the same defect.
How to review progress
Listen for changes in what employees believe a successful person must do to progress. Review whether recurring emergencies are actually less frequent and whether preventative work receives time and authority. Check that revised recognition does not simply replace one compulsory performance of commitment with another. People should not have to demonstrate visible serenity either. A healthy recognition system can appreciate effort without teaching everyone that the only work worth noticing is work performed beyond reasonable limits. The most useful success may be an ordinary week in which no rescue was required.
Sources and references
- Management Standards: Demands Opens in a new tab
Health and Safety Executive
Achievable demands, skills, work patterns and environment
- Management Standards: Relationships Opens in a new tab
Health and Safety Executive
Fairness, conflict and reporting unacceptable behaviour
- Mental wellbeing at work Opens in a new tab
NICE
NG212 sections 1.1 to 1.6: strategy, environment, managers and individual support
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